This is where life, for writers, lives

A few days ago I wrote here of my glorious mess—a novel I'd fought with and fought for over the stretch of a long time.

The first thing one has to do, when going back to a set-aside draft, is to set aside the shame one might feel at all that had been broken. The second thing one has to do is to dig in, to relish the process, to remember how much fun editing is. Not just minor line-by-line editing, mind you. But the upending of structure, the radical remaking of the voice(s), the ruthless deletions of scenes that had felt (be honest) soft when they first appeared on the page. Soft or obviously transitional. Soft or rather dull.

These past few days, plunged deeply in, I have discovered this: I had used the wrong tense in almost every instance. I had allowed the creeping in of an arch—and distant—voice (damn you, Beth Kephart, and your love for the lyric). I had buried the human story by focusing on the awesome technology that I had so proudly discovered and researched. I had allowed myself to go mythical when myths weren't actually needed. I had forgotten the power of a single, necessary kiss.

This is where life, for writers, lives, I think. Everything else—the tours, the fame, the sales—is secondary to being engaged with the story at hand. Secondary to pushing farther, going deeper, finding out what one is actually capable of. The writer remaking a story is the writer redefining not just the book, but herself.

All of which can happen only after we writers set a "finished" draft aside, and then return to it—vulnerable and humble—months or even years later.

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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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Editing Thyself Part 2, and The Genius in All of Us

In reviewing The Genius in All of Us, the new David Shenk book subtitled Why Everything You've Been Told About Genetics, Talent, and IQ is Wrong, Annie Murphy Paul gives us some tantalizing insights into a world of personal possibility. "That means there can be no guaranteed genetic windfalls, or fixed genetic limits, bestowed at the moment of conception," she writes in the New York Times Book Review. "Instead there is a continually unfolding interaction between our heredity and our world, a process that may be in some measure under our control."

There could be no one happier than yours truly to read this. My life brings me into constant contact with people of far greater intellect than I believe I'll ever possess,and I was never the smart one in my family. I am only and ever the one who keeps on working hard, who keeps trying, even as failures mount, to get somewhat ahead of myself.

This, apparently, is what Shenk is calling for, to "think of talent not as a thing, but as a process; not as something we have, but as something we do," in the words of the reviewer.

Shenk's own words are quoted here, toward the end of the review. They, too, touch me deeply. I recognize in him the striving that I yesterday described about myself. I am given cause to perhaps stop berating myself when I cannot at first get the sentence right:

“My attitude toward my own writing is simple: I assume that everything I write is rubbish until I have demonstrated otherwise. I will routinely write and rewrite a sentence, paragraph and/or chapter 20, 30, 40 times — as many times as it takes to feel satisfied.”

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Editing Thyself

Last night, toward the close of my talk at Rosemont College (what a fine group of people), a question came up from the very back row: Can you tell us about how you go about editing?

I answered thusly: The work begins with paper and pen, scribbled at some strange hour in handwriting I can barely interpret a day or so later. I then rewrite my scribbles, still with pen, making numerous changes as I go. Next I'm on the computer, typing things in, and here again, every sentence is weighed, and many are shifted. Two pages at a time, typically, and when the next two pages are layered in, they never quite fit with the first two pages, so editing begins again in earnest. Every time new pages come in, I'm reading back, several pages, then reading forward, to help achieve a seamlessness. And all of that leads to a first draft, which is only a first draft and never nearly a whole.

It is creating the whole, I indicated, that is in the end the hardest thing. It's easy to write sentences. It's possible to write passages. Often chapters congeal. Books, entire books, remain, to me, a mystery. Sometimes I get there. Sometimes I don't. My drawers are littered with lovely passages that never found their home.

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Get the character moving

There I was (had for so long been): on page 44 of my Seville novel, stopped and going no further. The tone was working, the characters seemed alive, the momentum was building, and then, smack—I was up against a wall.

Page 44 was a misery. I couldn't move forward at all.

But yesterday a client canceled a conference call, and suddenly I had this gift of two unexpected hours in a day that had begun in a corporate rush at two a.m. Two hours, and even the construction crew down the street had stopped banging against whatever it is they've been banging against, and I took out that mean and haggardly page 44 and hovered.

Suddenly I understood what had been wrong all along: I'd had my character sitting when she needed to be walking, when she needed to be going somewhere. If she moved, the plot would move. If she moved, I'd be forced to slice page 44 free of its lovely lull of detail.

I'd written the lines that I next excised more than ten years ago, clung to them for a decade. Yesterday, I gave them up, stood my character up, had her trail across the cortijo courtyard in a rising storm of dust.

Page 45.

It can all seem so easy, in retrospect.

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In Which the Son Rescues the Mother

Euphoria is short-lived in the life of a writer. You have an idea—oh, you have an idea—and you go all out in your attack of said idea—moving forward because you have to move forward because you don't have time (in the heat of the new) to slow things to a slog and hover over the fine points of perfection.

Then it has to happen: You slow down. You stop on a Saturday to read what you have written and you really wish you hadn't. You spend your next three days throwing out most of your work, swapping out paragraphs, cursing the day you opted out of law school (and why, in fact, did you opt out of law school when the law school library guys were so good looking?). Then you slow down, again, read what you've got, again, go off shopping for gifts for your many dear friends, again, and when you return to your desk and read once more, you hit a new low point of despair. You say to your son:

Can I, like, borrow you for an hour?

He says: Yeah, okay. Sure. What is it?

You say: Can you, like, sit on that Corbusier chaise over there while I read, um, nothing much just, well, you know, 38 pages of a stinking brand-new novel? Because we'll have steak tonight? Because it'll be just like you like it, which is to say, medium rare?

Um, he says. Sure, he says. Pulls half a can of Dr. Pepper out of the fridge and settles in for the haul.

And you read. And your son—he doesn't stop you. And you keep going, and what you've got, you realize, either isn't half bad or you're fooled by the sound of your own voice. And when you're done, and you look up, your son isn't even half asleep: He has a whole slew of questions that he's asking. Assumptions he tests. A few little pointers about that police work on page 10. He talks to you about motivation, does a few little turns around What if?

Oh my gosh, oh my goodness, now you answer me this: What would I do without this kid?

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So That We Might Sing

I have written often, on this blog, about the wonder and power of a truly good editor. Indulge me as I revisit the topic. For yesterday afternoon I received final notes from Balzer & Bray (at Harper)'s Jill Santopolo for my fourth YA novel, The Heart is Not a Size. She'd caught a few things here and there—a time lapse, an apology that needed tweaking, a scene that might fare better early on—and she'd done her line edits, too, noting those places, she said, where "I could feel the writer behind the words" or "when a certain image pulled me out of the story because I wanted to spend time decoding." She'd done all this while on the road with another author, and she'd done it because she cares that the book be as right as we can make it.

It won't be hard to imagine the happiness I felt this morning, then, when I returned to those pages to make them better, to twang and twist them, to sharpen and sear. The sweet second chance is, I think, the writer's greatest privilege: that image we didn't see coming, that story that grows more true, that note in the margin that exhorts us, Try again.

The singing that gets done in the crafting of final prose.

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