Seeing Vs. Thinking Part 2

I don’t wish to be misunderstood and have it believed that I don’t believe thinking is important. Quite the opposite. Indeed, part of the potency of writing is that writing offers organized thinking. The finished writing product is carefully constructed, ordered. It is architecture with engineering. What I do wish to distinguish is where and when that kind of formalized thought process occurs. As the cliché suggests, most of writing is re-writing. Revision takes a great deal of concentrated thought. Much of the work of revision is identifying relationships, ordering ideas, pursuing patterns, developing a cohesive, forward-moving, engineered text, only one where the reader can’t quite see all the elements of structural support. But you must provide the ideas legs and means of expression. You must have text first, and I am firmly convinced that over thinking a text before you have the raw materials will keep you from ever producing much of anything. It doesn’t necessarily take much to start or to move deeper within a text, not much more than the ability to see an image or a scene, although this does mean releasing control to the text rather than to the logical mind. That comes later and is equally vital.


We need writers who are clear thinkers. We need writers with ideas, not fluff. For me, the roots of texts exist in such vaguely formed and murky ideas that I must start with images or a character’s or narrator’s voice or a circumstance. It is THROUGH the writing that the ideas begin to clarify and take shape.

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.

Listening to Your Draft Readers

When you use readers for your work (and you really must), don't forget to listen.  Sounds obvious, huh?  But you'd be surprised.  Listen to them.  Listen to what they are really saying.  They are being heartfelt  (Or are you really so far gone you don't chose readers you know you need to listen to?)  Think about what they say and then think some more.

I'm not saying you have to agree with them.  You don't.  Perhaps much of the time you shouldn't.  But you have to consider the work they've put in at your request, think about the greater objectivity they can bring to a text, ponder the points of your work that provide them struggle.

Once you've listened to them, once you've contemplated their reactions, then really listen to yourself.  Not your dreaming of being done with this damn thing self, not your dreaming about publication self, listen to the part of you that has been whispering in your ear since the beginning.  About that nagging part of our character you never actually portrayed.  About that little logistical problem you keep avoiding.  About that really difficult chapter you have never written because you're not sure how.  You've been unsure before and you have found a way.  Part of why you gave your readers the text is so that you can finally face the revisions you've known are necessary for so long now.  Listening to them will help you listen to your honest self.

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.

Letting Go

I have just finished writing the first draft of a new novel.  It has been nearly a year in the making.  I have but a bit more typing to catch up on and I have been, with the indulgence of my patient wife, reading the full book for the first time.  So now I reach that critical stage of revision, that process of assessing the book and seeing its needs and attempting to locate the solutions for those needs.  It is always precarious stuff, for the completion of a project of this size can cloud your vision.  It is like faling in love.  You are are so certain you are falling that you can't see clearly, yet of course love scares you, for it is an investment in another and in yourself and in blind belief, and out of that fear the logical part of you knows you must act a bit carefully, knows that you can't make real commitments without intelligence and respect while also remaining true to your core emotional self.  With a book, it is too easy to love it and just as easy to despise it.  Niether are useful places for edting and revision.  You must find the middle ground wherein you can identify what is deserving of loving and what cannot be passed over without more exertion, more discipline.  You have to find a way to walk the line between emotion and logic--the book will need both.

It is also a time of beginning the long goodbye.  You have lived this book every day of your life for nearly a year and you will continue to live with it daily for some months more.  Its people and places are as real to you, maybe more real to you than your waking life.  But if you get it right, if you finish the revison and give the book its own life, you must let it go out into the world and suffer the ravages of the world on its own.  You're trying your best to make it ready.  You want it strong and hardy and ready to succeed in the world.  You have devoted yourself to the thing and now you must let it go.  (And maybe more scary still, you must now go find its sibling and start all over again--but that is, as they say, another story.)

I have written this current book in the year where my youngest child has also left home and gone out into the world. We've tried our best to make her ready, and while we celebrate her success, we are in a kind of deep grief, for she and her sisters have been the focus of our live's most important work for the span of a generation now.  It is hard work for her too.  Like the book, the world we face upon our own is not always an immediately kind or welcoming one, or so it seems.  The hardest lesson for the parents, and for writers, maybe harder still for children (and books?) is to recognize that letting go is not saying goodbye, that the bonds remain every bit as strong, as formative even once we've had to share this being with the larger world.

Parallelism

I've been thinking a great deal lately about the role of parallelism in literature, the way that in good work it can be as if we've entered a hall of mirrors, a hall of mirrors erected at angles and cantered by varying degrees such that images reflect back on themselves although never in a direct line, never a simple exact duplicate. This is how jazz works differently than pop music where you can hear the recurrent theme but it never repeats precisely, instead the theme gets reborn again and again in new variations. In pop you get simply, overt repetition of the theme--catchy, sing-worthy, but predictable on many levels. Good books work more like jazz. Sometimes they do so at the largest levels of construction and sometimes only in the most nuanced bits of metaphor and image. The best books often do both.

Perhaps I've been thinking about this so much lately because I am nearing the end of the first draft of a new novel. Frequently on a given day I am writing new material in the morning, material that is creeping up on the awareness that it is pushing near the ending, and by late morning or early afternoon I am either typing material or editing material (more often both--well always both as I type) that was originally written months ago. This constant forward backward movement allows me to look at the earliest passages of the book from the distance of some hindsight (and a new awareness of where the story actually goes) and to see in the newest material the moments when it best reflects the language, tone, images, and rhythms of its origins. Of course this allows me to see, and I hope, capitalize more fully on the echoes and parallelisms that are organically present in the text. That's how it is for me: discovering what has occurred organically at the rather subconscious phase of the original writing and then stepping away into the analytical ability to see in it what is natural what works, and then, with luck, enhance that.

The presence of such development was made material for me the other night when my wife and I were watching a commentary from the writers and directors of "The West Wing" about an episode titled "Two Cathedrals." (Okay, I am rarely a fan of TV, and the series is now years removed, but we are rapid fans of this show; one of those rare shows that is powerfully and smartly written, beautifully directed, and brilliantly acted--why aren't there more?) The writer and director spoke at length about the way they began to envision the use of the convergence of two story lines and the employment of the past and the present through the parallelism of events and of settings. Employing parallelism, symbolism, repeated image and gesture and parallelism in dialogue lines, they move the viewer seamlessly in time, going so far as to trust the viewer enough to be intelligent enough to catch more nuanced points of time transition (something TV rarely does--trust the intelligence of its audience). Beyond employing parallelism in time, they also used these patterns to allow the personal life of the President to reflect the political and executive decisions he encountered, which is one of the very things that drew viewers to the series in the first place, the humanization of a fictional equivalent of those in power from whom we are so otherwise removed and yet so dependent upon. Is that not one of the roles of literature after all, to humanize and activate ideas and experiences that otherwise seem removed and too large in scope to comprehend.

About the same time as seeing this commentary I was finishing my reading of an older Stewart O'Nam novel The Names of the Dead. Now O'Nam is consistently an enviable craftsman, someone whose work I not only enjoy but learn from. He uses parallelism in both plot and image to do something similar and move the reader within two time periods--past and present. Given that Larry Markham, his protagonist suffers PTSD from his service as a medic in Vietnam, the creation of the reader's ability to inhabit the two time periods is critical, for of course Larry does, as do all people who have survived horrific and traumatic circumstances. Memory does not leave. Indeed science shows us that without biological manipulation, the memory of absolute fear cannot leave. The reader must experience this in order to begin to formulate and understanding of Larry's present. The fluidity with which O'Nam transitions such movement in time is precisely the sort of thing writers must study if they are to learn the larger elements of craft.

Of course literature can succeed with employing identifiable applications of parallelism in part because life does. We often fail to see the images and symbols and interweaving lines of such parallelism in our lives simply because our lives are to close to see in focus. Literature allows us to examine such structures and to ask why they exist, to examine what they reveal. As always, when we encounter such applications in good books, we examine our lives and our world anew as well.

Revision Revisited

The word "confluence" appears all over this page I know, but it is something real, something organic, a thing I have come to believe in and and an expression I have come to use where others might use karma or sycronicity or even community. It has particular meaning for me in regards to writing and is on my mind nearly always when I am in the deep trenches of revision. Particularly when one is revising a novel, perhaps the strongest force directing revision is finding the points of confluence, finding, if you will, where the threads interect like the fibers from which the woven garment is constructed. Where does an image need to reoccur? Where does a signifier associated with a character help prepare for her future self or indicate his lingering presence? Where does one chapter echo another? More imortantly still, when one trusts the organic nature of the creative process, how can one learn to listen to the text by paying attention to where currents naturally intersect?

In his wonderful novel The Goat Bridge T.M. McNally writes: "Study the common things of this world long enough and things reveal increasingly what they have in common: namely, the language by which we describe them. This search for detecting forms of order and arrangement, always, is the work of all artists, regardless of form." Such is the work of book-length revision, detecting order, studying arrangement via shared language. Do so long enough, carefully enough and you create work that achieves intrinsic unity. Then maybe, if you have done your job well, the book helps you see how such unity is reflected in the world around you too, for it is the world that gave you the book from within the confuence of the imaginative and the real.

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.