HOW DO YOU DO IT?

I was thinking yesterday about all the days that have passed since I really started writing seriously. I remember all the questions I used to ask published writers and how star-struck I was back then. How do you write: computer or long hand? When do you write and how do you make the time? Should I outline? Do you outline? Why? Why not? What equipment do you use? Dixon Ticonderoga #2 Soft or #2 Medium? All of it then seemed so important—such prerequisites before I could begin. What I know now, many years later (significantly less star struck, if at all) is that writing is 50% mastery of craft and 50% mastery of the knowledge of self. One needs to know how one’s own mind works and what brings pleasure to the Self.


Writing is so very individual. Sure, there are literary devices and rules one must learn. Show vs. Tell. Pacing. Dialogue. Start with action. Vivid imagery. Active not Passive Voice. But on the flip side, what is most important is the enjoyment of the process itself. Why do something that gives you such angst and worry and tension? What I’m getting at is how different we all really are and how there are few hard and fast rules when you get right down to it. Never has this been more apparent than now, as I read what some published writers have had to say about revisions. This from the recent convergence of all my magazines and newsletters this past week:


The reason to perfect a piece of prose as it progresses—to secure each sentence before building on it—is that original writing fashions a form. It unrolls out into nothingness. It grows cell to cell, bole to bough to twig to leaf; any careful word may suggest a route, may begin a strand of metaphor or event out of which much, or all, will develop. Perfecting the work inch by inch, writing from the first word toward the last, displays the courage and fear this method induces. The strain, like Giacometti’s penciled search for precision and honesty, enlivens the work and impels it toward its truest end. A pile of decent work behind him, no matter how small, fuels the writer’s hope too; his pride emboldens and impels him.
----Annie Dillard, Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft


Why do you prefer to polish your sentences as you write?

It just seems a natural thing for me to do. If I make an approximation in this sentence, then how is the next sentence that confronts me going to be accurate or precise? Understanding that in this incredibly complex object that you’re trying to create, everything must ultimately, organically resonate into everything else. The flow of the narrative must maintain a deep and complex rhythm to it, so to let the sentence at hand be less than it fully can be right now, if I worked hard enough at it, makes the next sentence and the next and the next impossible to write with any precision. Things just get less and less precise or they take directions from which you will never be able to retrace your steps to another more wonderful possibility.
----Robert Olen Butler, Writers Ask




When I wrote “May” it was a different experience. I spent a month completely rewriting it and rewriting it and rewriting it, which for me, then, was a very long period of time. And once I started revising it after that conference, where Pam Houston gave me all that encouragement, I probably spent as much time, again, revising, and that was a lesson to me. I also discovered that, God, I enjoy revision. In some perverse way, I just love cutting the piece to shreds and saving what’s good in it. It’s odd, because a lot of the stories are about mining, and it seemed to me that writing is a lot like mining. Looking for that one nugget, you go through a lot of waste rock to find that one thing that’s gold. And so I hadn’t sent it out. Actually, I think people send things out too early.
----Roy Parkin, Writers Ask




A final revision is only final because you have a deadline and can take no more time over it. Or because you are so sick of it that any more tampering would produce diminishing returns. There are no rules.
----Lynn Freed, Writers Ask





Do you have the language in your head?

Yes, if I have the narration, I have the language. So I get that all set. Then I have a really hard time starting. I’ll write the first 50 pages of a book 20 times, but once I get going, once I have the voice right and the narrative right, the characters in place and the start is right, I go pretty cleanly. When I finish a chapter, I go back and polish it for a couple of days and then go on to the next one, I do not get to the end of a book and then start a second draft....When I type that last sentence of the book, that book is extremely close to the book that you will see in the bookstores. I do it as I go along. I can’t go onto the next part until the last part is right.
----Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto



I am solidly between Robert Olen Butler and Roy Parkin. I absolutely love revision. The knowing of what’s there but the cutting away, the refining and the finding what’s good, what’s valuable. The search for the one right word to make it better. The reading out loud of the dialogue and asking, “Would a person really speak like this? No, cut it and go back.” And though I feel the shitty first draft that Anne Lamott speaks of has definite value, I can certainly understand where Robert Olen Butler is coming from. As I work on my own piece here, cutting and cutting this opening prologue and chapter one to get it just right I do see it getting much more solid, much clearer and certainly final. The prologue and the chapter one have both been through ten revisions already. What would be the value of running through the whole novel again only to not have it absolutely perfect. What would be the value of moving on to the next chapter, the next scene, taking myself out of this moment, this space where the characters are only to have to come back to it and pray that the Muse will conjure up the same feelings I am feeling at this moment?
It doesn’t make sense to me.

But as I said earlier, it really is such an individual decision. For some people, it is so important—and downright crucial—to see the numbers change. Chapter One. Okay, now I’m on Chapter Two. Next week, goody! I’m on Chapter Five. But for some, progress is defined by the fact that a section is finished, that it exists exactly as they intended it to be and that it is strong enough to hold up the next chapter and the next chapters to come.


Much the same with outlining. Some people can’t think unless they have a roadmap in front of them. Others, perhaps less visual, would be stifled to death with something written out from A-Z and just really need more creative room. That is what this is all about isn’t it?


Yes, it’s all individual and one has to find what works for them. Find out how their own mind works best. And then just do it.

Be Good,

ANGEL