Lessons I've learned during my revisionary quest (with thanks to Tamra Tuller)

I would say that the lessons I've learned over the past year of writing my Florence novel are hard ones—except that I would rather not see them that way. Instead, I would like to categorize these generative discoveries as essential, thrilling, character building. As proof that every single book is like the first book written.

They are lessons about not letting Idea trump Story. About getting out of the way of one's own fascinations. About giving each draft room to breathe. About not letting shame—about a poorly written passage or a badly conceived moment—intrude upon the revisionary quest.

I have moved from mess toward clarity and then away from excess rigor. I have moved from tunneling perspective toward a slightly softening lens. I have mixed things up, set things straight, then made room for blur. I have moved from characters who did the work of the tale toward characters inevitably impelled. I have gone as far as I thought I could go, then gathered my wits about me and gone after it again—scouring out the boring places where nothing happens, the language that is too pretty because nothing happens, the conversations that don't need to be transcribed because they can be imagined and besides, inside them not much happens. I have righted the ship, which is to say, I have worked on balance.

And I am working on it still.

I wish to thank Miss Tamra Tuller, whose Twitter handle reads "Thumb Wrestler, Whiskey Drinker, and Children's Book Editor at Chronicle Books" for sticking by me along the way.

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Shake Me For Service: National Novel Writing Month and a Challenge from Yours Truly

National Novel Writing Month bills itself as "thirty days of literary abandon."  I like that.  I would like to add, as someone who stands in supreme awe of anyone who can write 50,000 words in a single month, that NaNoWriMo is a challenge for the extremely brave, the highly disciplined, and the bold of heart.  Within this month, entire worlds will be created, characters revealed, plots escalated.  As someone who can get caught in the tangle of a single paragraph for hours (okay, sometimes days) I do not know how this gets done.

The point of NaNo is to get a first draft done.  To make the broad strokes, to test an idea.  But what happens after those first 50,000 words are inked (or dotted), is, in my mind, even more crucial.  It's during revision that the music of a story is found, the real meaning, the finer possibilities.  It is during revision that the actual story emerges.

I care perhaps too much about language.  I want to take risks with it, yearn to push it.  I will write, for example, an Emmy character in You Are My Only who doesn't speak with ordinary cadence and doesn't read the world through cliches, because I think we have a responsibility as writers not just to tell stories, but to try to tell stories artfully, with originality and daring.  I will spend ten years working the sentences of Small Damages because I cannot let those gypsies, that south of Spain, that music, that old cook down.  I recognize that I am in a growing minority.  I recognize that what is art to me could be just so many plot-obstructing words to another.  I recognize that my passion for words, my own preference for authors who make sentences that are not just compelling and clear, but startling and fresh, is Beth showing her quirky stubborn side.

Still, I am in that constant hunt for a real writer writing.  I will fill my shelves with Julie Otsuka, Julian Barnes, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Enright, William Fiennes, Chloe Aridjis, Kim Echlin, Jane Mendelsohn, Ron Hansen, Colm Toibin, Colum McCann, Per Petterson, and so many more (and here I have purposefully not included any of my friends, so that you can be assured I am being completely objective) because I am inspired and informed and given hope by their commitment to the pure, hard jewel of the single sentence.

It has taken me four paragraphs to get to the point.  My point is this.  I am running a contest.  I am seeking, from the NaNo writers, this:  A single sentence as it was first written in the heat of a NaNo moment, and that same sentence after it has been reconsidered, revised.  Please send your entries to kephartblog AT comcast DOT net before December 20.  I will list my favorite transformations here and give the winner a signed copy of either a You Are My Only hardcover or an ARC of Small Damages, my novel due out from Philomel next July.  (The winner will choose.)

I hope that those of you who are so inclined will help me spread the news.

For more posts on (and examples of) the making of sentences, click here, here, and here.

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Moving Past Self-Doubt, Toward Final

I have spoken, often, of this book that I have carried with me through a decade of rework, reconfiguration, enough half faith not to give up on it entirely, but still. Tears have been shed. Papers tossed across the room. Favorite sections and characters hacked out all to preserve: What?

The mood and the flavors and the dust and the flamenco and the carnations thrown from the rooftops of Seville.

I have spoken of this book, and oh, I have fought with it. You want to know where self-doubt lives, in a writer like me? It lives in the books I don't know how to finish, in the sentences that seem marred, in the static of first-person present, in the over-stress of conjunctions.

A few weeks ago, close to what seemed done to me, a very special reader read the book. She encouraged. She had questions. Ever since—through the throes of snow, client work, and a fever—I've been working to find answers, to move through the text one more time, to move through it newly.

I was struggling with rhythms as I made plot changes. I was mourning yet more favorite passages lost. I was intrigued by the introduction of two new characters—brand new and ultimately welcome. Finally, I thought, I was getting somewhere, and this morning, I rose again at that strange, sacred hour, to read the whole book through.

I think I've gotten somewhere.

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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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Wiser than I: My Boy to the Rescue

For six months, maybe more, I've been at work on a book that has been in my head for a very long time. It's that novel for adults from which I sometimes post excerpts, this strange collision of place, purpose, mood that I selfishly sit with when friends should be called, when grander responsibilities beckon, when I should be cracking the spine on the recipe book to spice up the meals around here. But I can't let it go.

Yesterday I printed the novel's first 150 pages and sat down to read on the deck. Nothing we write is ever what we think we have written—at least it is that way for me. So that, despite the fact that I'd worked these pages through at least two dozen drafts, had already tossed multiple subplots, had trashed a few favorite symbols, had thrashed myself over rhythm and line, I still did not know what I had. I still did not realize that I was up against a pacing dilemma. Twenty pages in, out on my deck, I did.

For the next several hours I was a frustrated writer, shuffling my deck, black Xing through pages I'd loved, shuffling the deck again. I was rewriting, resketching, rethinking, and finally, I called out to my son, whose work, as I have often said, is cleaner and brighter than my own.

"Jeremy," I said, "just take a look at this first page please. Would it interest you if you found it in a bookstore? Would you care enough to read on?"

He studied that page. He scratched the back of his sweet head. He sat down and pulled me to him.

"You want to know what I think?" he asked.

"I do," I said. "I promise."

"You want suspense, I imagine, and tension, right?"

"That's what I want," I nodded.

"Then take the fourth line. Make it the first line. Break the third paragraph right here." He drew a line with his thin finger.

I considered his suggestion. I flipped things in my mind. I went to my computer, typed it all newly in.

"Hey," I called to him when I was done. "Will you look at this?"

He got up, left the room where his music was playing. He came around to my silence, stood by my shoulder, leaned in, read. "That works," he said. "That does it."

And the thing is that it did.

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Headed for Perfection (or at least pointed that way)

Those of you who are in the middle of writing something are also, inevitably, in the middle of revising something.

Over at Brimstone Soup, Holly Cupala, a young adult author (and a Readergirlz marvel), has been shining light on the revisionary path with a program called Summer Revision Smackdown. I've learned a lot in previous posts, and today Holly is hosting me, as I think out loud about my own revisionary patterns, and instincts. Check it out, if you have a chance.

Also, Kathye Fetsko Petrie, a big-hearted local literary legend has a piece in the Examiner about authors' summer reading lists. What, she wanted to know, are some of us reading this summer?

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Revisioning

On finding the energy to remake one's own book...

And thanking that most remarkable Anna Lefler, who graced my life with J. Crew before the whole nation was clamoring for Crew, sent me flowers that still sit here, whole, and remarked on 36 pages of a newly made book with the words I absolutely needed just then.

And I'm thanking you, too, Miss Jill Santopolo. Despite the fact that our ships cross in the night, and also because of it. (And also despite the fact that you own better shoes than I ever will. But we knew that. For years we did.)

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