If It Would Have Been a Snake...

When we are deep in the bowels of working on a writing project, does the world really offer up magic to us with astonishing frequency or are we just paying attention?  For instance, this week I stumbled upon a William Stafford poem "Ask Me" that includes in four lines the distilled essence of a central theme I've taken 500 pages and 10 years to get right in a novel.  Would I have understood those lines without the years and pages?  Would I have seen them at all?

I'm honestly not sure.  The world does seem full with magic at times.  I do know I must be awake to see it.

Endless Editing

How is it possible that you can work through your manuscript dozens of times spread over years and still realize how much it benefits from editing.  I'm prone to verbosity, so eliminating wordiness probably shouldn't come as a surprise.  And, as an editor recently reminded me (something I told myself and my students for years), there are times you need to trust your reader to get what you are spending too much time detailing.  Then there are the filler words, like a freshman stumbling through the first speech.  Still I thought I'd caught it all.  I haven't.  You can't come close to the aggressiveness of editing the manuscript needs until you let go.  Give it to a near stranger who has nothing at stake.  She may not see the editing needs, but your psychology can change for having given it to her.  I did.  Again.  The book will be better for it, and that's what counts.

Structure and Shape

As I was working on the never-ending revision of an early novel, a particularly layered, difficult novel to be fair, I found myself asking the question: can structure alone save a story?  Now even as I type that, I know it is a ludicrous question, for no element alone can carry a story, let alone save it.  Everything in a novel works in harmony if it works at all.  It would be asking too much of any element, be it structure, plot, character to do the work a whole book must do.  But as I contemplated the intended revisions, I saw also that by giving careful, renewed attention to the shape of the story I also found entrance to other elements to partner with it, aspects of narrative and character that echoed the logic behind the desired structural revision.  To the journal I turned.  From the journal to the manuscript.  Work begets more work, but perhaps together solutions emerge.

Endless Revision

For years as a teacher I preached that so much of writing was really rewriting, that revision literally often meant re-seeing a text. How true that remains. Water Cycle is a book that has taken years and years to write, in large part because I had to learn how to write a book, and in large part because I chose a project (perhaps purposefully, perhaps to impose self-punishment) that is intricate, complicated, layered. I've spent the last three or four days not just revisiting a text that most would feel is complete, but working on one more short chapter that might help relieve an itch that has always existed, a need to have one of the dead characters in the book have a chance at touching the reader from beyond the grave. It is a revision that is a response both to a need I have always felt but never been able to articulate and a reaction to my interpretation of what several agents have been quietly indicating. Mostly this latest revision comes with a thank you to a quality reader who (my youngest daughter) who not only proved a close, and capable reader, but one willing to take me seriously when I asked her questions. 18 and about to leave for college, the quality of her reading reminds me again of why we must never dismiss the young just because they are young, and why we can always sustain hope for our future. Sometime a reader can offer you just the right prompt to make you ask questions of yourself and then return to instincts on how you respond to those questions. Ultimately good revision can be as fulfilling as the initial creative act, for you begin to see the deeper textures, the veins and sinew running within a text that fuel it and hold it together. In the end the focus remains on finding the way to tell all the story as it wishes and needs to be told. It's just that sometime it takes years to listen to the story.