PROGRESS NOTE

Day 3 of the rewrites and thus far things are moving along just wonderfully. I’ve been in touch with some folks down in DC who are really helping me figure out how to make this embezzlement scheme as authentic as possible. Rather than have my character bilk the money off the retirement accounts, I’ve moved him into OFRM – (Office of Finance and Resource Management) where he’ll come in direct contact with the accounts receivables which are much easier to manipulate. What I’m most grateful for, aside from these very generous folks who are lending me their time, is that I’m a writer during the internet age. There is nothing you can’t find out these days. The wonderful thing about my story is that it’s set in the early nineties when DC was full of scandal. Scandal galore! I’m finding so much coverage on the scandals that went down during that time, I almost don’t know what to do with it all. Last night, I was up until way too late reading and printing out over sixty pages of improprieties, auditor reports from inappropriate payments made to vendors that didn’t have contractual agreements with the city. Gheez Louise! Millions and millions of dollars spent, coded with the wrong codes – office supplies, equipment rentals. All right here on the net for public, or in my case – novelist – consumption.

So I got to thinking about this whole process of rewriting and a recent telephone conversation with a friend whose stuck in a fit of starts and stops. Over the years I’ve heard many people complain about how hard it is, how awful, that it’s taking them years and years to get the story right. Some abandon their stories altogether and some spend year after year after year rewriting. I’ve even heard people call it downright hell, which is something I can’t imagine saying. I love what I do too much to call it that and over the years I’ve learned that when it gets to feeling too hard, too uncomfortable it’s simply time to put it down and move to something else. (Kind of like when people say that a place “looks like a war zone.” It boggles my mind. Do you really know what a war zone looks like?, I often want to say).

But I do ask myself: when does it stop? When does revising become simply a “spinning of the wheels?” When is a story no longer a story but simply a learning experience? Or something else?

Toni Morrison says that if you don’t like revising then you’d better find a different vocation. Writing is 100% revision. The other thing she’s said is that she doesn’t believe in writer’s block in the conventional sense that we know it. Rather than think that the “words aren’t there” or the “story isn’t there,” she thinks it is simply a message to set the work aside, work on something else. Allow both the mind and the work to rest, which in turn gives you a freshness—a new perspective—when you come back to it. To add to that truth is the bare bone truth that sometimes we are not writing what we think we are but writing toward something else; that what we think we are writing is either a) part of something else to come or b) something that may take form later but needs time to gel, mold, take solid form. As a young writer I have become very comfortable with the fact that not everything I write is intended for publication. Some things are just a “getting ready” for something else. Case in point: three lines of a poem I wrote recently have found themselves at the end of the second scene in my short story, Butterflies in Brooklyn.

The opening line of the poem written in dedication to the Mother Poets before me reads:

You are an ancient rhythm
The drumbeat of lost tribes
A hieroglyphic tracing
Leading lost souls back to buried treasures of Gold and Silver
Frankincense and Myrrh

The path of your righteousness is paved by morning glories
Your resting place the silk bed of roses ....


and then this same line found itself in my short story:

"Beneath a crescent Brooklyn moon, Amir pulls me into the warmth of his chest. His arms are two warm blankets that wrap themselves around me and cover me with a smooth evenness. We shift and reposition and suddenly Amir becomes an ancient rhythm, the drumbeat of lost tribes. Our hushed laughter, probing hands, darting tongues and fingers are hieroglyphic tracings leading our lost souls to ancient treasures. The scent of our lovemaking is a rising wave of frankincense and myrrh. Tonigt on the rooftop I am enveloped in all that is familiar; all that has been lost and recovered. Seeds of righteousness lay at my feet waiting to be planted in fertile land. Waiting for hope. Hoping for courage."

I had been struggling for a long time with this story and after writing the poem I found the parts that were missing. They were there all the time but needed another form in which to be released.


I start stories all the time, simply because the voice (or the teller of the story) has decided to drop in on me that day. I put no pressure on the story or myself for it to "be" anything. I have no high expectations of finishing it in a week and seeing it in the New Yorker the next month. I simply allow it to come and be as it is.

Rather than ignore the voice, I simply record what I hear coming to me and I set it aside. I’ll never forget when I wrote my first short story, Men Troubles. I was smack dab in the middle of my novel, trying to forge ahead, and this woman’s voice kept coming to me. She was sitting on a porch and started telling me about a pool of blood that had soaked into the wood. She started saying how hot it was that day, “a mosquito feast,” she said and how there wasn’t “a blade of grass moving in the whole city.” Well, I told my friend, I said, “hey this sounds good but I have to get this novel done. I don’t have time for this woman.” But God knows she was always in my ear. So my friend said, “then tell her that Angel. Write down what she says and then just tell her that. She’ll understand.” My friend, an accomplished writer, really believes as does Alice Walker, that the ancestors know who to tell their stories to. So I did just that. I wrote down what she said and kept moving. Eventually the story was done and I did get very good reviews on it. But I worked on it for over a year, only coming to it when I knew I had something to offer, something to say.

I guess what I’m saying is that every writer has to know when the story is done, that is, when you have nothing more to say. Or when what you’re saying is still not heading in the direction it needs to head, taking time to consider that perhaps it’s part of something else. Writing is first about honesty: honesty about yourself, your characters and their space in time. Perhaps when revision turns to pain it is simply, as Toni Morrison says, not “right time.” Maybe she knows a thing or two since she’s only published, what seven or eight novels in all these years? And years, five or more, pass in between some of those. As Alice Walker advises, that’s when it’s time to learn how to do something else. Write a poem. Knit. Take up gardening. Learn a new language. Teach some preschoolers how to read. Paint. Jog. Set it aside. Start the next novel. This is particularly applicable to first novels. Some first novelists strike a home run on the first story. Some don’t. Some have to shelf the first project as a learning experience then come back to it after the second or third novel is done. Perhaps in doing so they’ve given it (and their minds) the time it needs to work itself out.

As for me I can honestly say that my story is indeed moving forward. I see it taking form. The time I spent doing that outline was incredibly helpful because I do have a clear picture of what I want to say and how I want to say it. The workshops out in Iowa were immensely helpful, in addition to all the self learning I’ve done and continue to do: John Gardner’s books on Fiction Writing, Janet Burroway, Natalie Goldberg and her Zen approach, Sol Stein and all the Creative Screenwriting magazines that teach good dialogue. Another thing that is incredibly beneficial to me is switching forms. I write poetry, short stories, essays and even monologues. In fact, I have a choreopoem that I started about two years ago, that I shelved for lack of knowledge about theater production. The piece needs work and occasionally I go back to it, especially during my slow moments with the novel. I love my poems, each and every one of them. They are my thoughts and as you can tell, I value my thoughts. But most of all, I think that having my children gives me the balance I need to keep my writing from becoming painful. I’m so busy with them that by the time I do get back to my desk the words just seem to come, as if they’ve been sitting there waiting patiently for me, empathetic and loving, knowing that I will do my very best as soon as I sit down.

I do pray that it all comes together but by the same token I will not spend a lifetime revising one novel. Soon enough—and I pray I have the good sense to know when—it’ll be time to move on. But for now, that time is not here.

Be good,
ANGEL