There's Rewriting, and Then There's REWRITING

It's a good thing life is all about the journey, because the novel I'm currently rewriting has been part of my life's journey since 1995. It seems amazing to me that I knocked out the initial draft in three short months.

It was my first completed novel (I'd attempted another about seven years prior, which I was unable to complete, and I still haven't given up on that one, either). Because I lacked the craft to tell a story involving so many characters, I chose six of them and let each speak in his or her own voice. These were and are, I hope, authentic and fully fleshed characters, but there was no through-line that held them together and made the reader think, hope, or wonder what would happen next. Each of them experienced transformative events, yes, but that's not enough.

I submitted the poor darling in this early stage, being too stupid to know any better and too thrilled that I'd actually completed it, and while I got a number of responses to my queries asking to see more, no one bit. For this, we are most humbly grateful.

I rewrote it two or three times after that; I've lost count. And while I moved it out of the passive voice (a built-in problem when you're writing first-person narrative accounts) and into the active voice, this "improvement" still did not address the novel's inherent flaws. It's like having all the ingredients you need to make a wonderful cake, but not knowing how to properly combine them: your cake comes out flat.

I submitted it twice in this incarnation, and at least one agent said she loved my voice. Which is to say: I love the way you write; now, if only you knew how to tell a story.

Years go by. I attempt other novels, and I saddle them with similar problems. I read myriad books on writing, and it continues to amaze me that I, who love to read and love to write, can know so little about what constitutes good storytelling. And then Lisa Cron's book comes along, Wired for Story, and finally, finally, I see what I've been doing wrong.

It's time to try again. I take this novel I've written so many times, and I begin to write it all over again, fresh and new, from page one. And I think, I hope, I pray, I've got it this time. (I am nothing if not loyal to my characters and their stories, and nothing if not dogged in my determination to do them justice.) I'm only seventy pages in, but I'm encouraged. I plod on with a lighter heart this time.

The Julia Glass Experience

I'm sure it's wrong of me to be so brief, but I've just finished The Whole World Over by Julia Glass and offer this paltry review. The book is:

Keenly, minutely observed. Exquisitely written. Each sentence fresh, each metaphor new and perfect. Stories interwoven naturally, not cleverly. No seams showing. Yet: I didn't care, I cared, I cared, I cared, I cared, I didn't care, I wanted it to be over. And: some character names not only didn't fit, but annoyed me every time I saw them. Nevertheless, if you're a reader, read it, if only for the assured and beautiful writing and crafting.

I read Glass's Three Junes years ago and both enjoyed and admired it, yet today I remember nothing about it. I read a synopsis online and thought, 'Really?' How could I have feasted for days at a banquet that size and not remember a single thing I ate?

Whereas I suspect I'll savor Olive Kitteridge, this year's favorite read, forever.

Olive Kitteridge, I Love You

If I haven't finished reading Olive Kitteridge, does that mean I can't stop and praise it? I'm only reading it slowly so it won't be over. I'll read it a second time, hoping the bones will show and I can study them.

Solitary Man and My Singular Objections

I've had an intestinal flu for the last few days, so I've been lying abed watching movies. You can't imagine my delight when I discovered that Solitary Man was playing on cable. Now I could record it and watch it free of charge and, being sick, free of guilt. Which I did. Last night.

Here's what I know for sure: You can't spend the first eighty-five minutes of your movie showing the audience what a dick you are, then sit on a bench in the final scene neatly telling them why. Writers of fiction are constantly being admonished to show, not tell. Aren't writers of screenplays bound by this, and more so?

John Cheever, Enchanted Realist

The years of my life are often marked by whatever I read or listened to that year that impressed me most, and I recall each year fondly on that basis. Last year it was War and Peace, which I expected to enjoy far more than I actually did, sad to say. The year before that, it was Raymond Carver's entire oeuvre, along with first wife Maryann Carver's book, What It Used to Be Like -- a frank recounting of her long, destructive marriage to the alcoholic Carver -- whose real-life incidents figured into Carver's stories often very directly. The year before that it was Lolita. I had never read it and was absolutely bowled over not just by the beauty and skill of Nabokov's prose, but by the way in which he made me complicit in his awful crimes. The year before that it was the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of Anna Karenina, which was so thrilling, it practically mandated that I finally read War and Peace, which, as I said, turned out to be less thrilling by half.

This year it's John Cheever, and what a happy reader he's made me. Though I've not yet graduated to his novels, I'm reading the excellent, prize-winning The Stories of John Cheever, as well as his exquisite journals. Philip Roth is the one who called him an "enchanted realist," and it's as good an epithet as I could want. The thing that awes me is the degree of specificity he brings to his setting, and then to his characters, and then to his story, and then to his understanding of human nature. It goes without saying that one can't deal in specificity of this sort without a keen intellect, a wide, writer's vocabulary, and a ruthlessly observant eye.

Here's a passage I enjoyed from last night's story, "The Lowboy:"

Some people make less of an adventure than a performance of their passions. They do not seem to fall in love and make friends but to cast, with men, women, children, and dogs, some stirring drama that they were committed to producing at the moment of their birth. This is especially noticeable on the part of those whose casting is limited by a slender emotional budget. The clumsy performances draw our attention to the play. The ingenue is much too old. So is the leading lady. The dog is the wrong breed, the furniture is ill-matched, the costumes are threadbare, and when the coffee is poured there seems to be nothing in the pot. But the drama goes on with as much terror and pity as it does in more magnificent productions.

Blogger's Lament

I seem to have developed that worst of afflictions, resistance to my own blog. In an era when mastery of social media is an obligatory art, I find myself willing to do almost anything except blog. Foolishly, I gave myself three hungry blogs to feed and maintain. This gives me that much more to resist, neglect, and feel guilty about.

Underlying my resistance to spending time in this fashion is my belief that no one really cares. I know the writer/agent/editor axis holds that building a platform is the end-all-be-all to sales. But I question the reliability of this assumption. I question it because I myself do not seek online contact with the authors of the books I read. I don't have time. I barely have time to read their books. And there's nothing more I want from them apart from the pleasure of reading their work.

I follow any number of wonderful writers on Twitter, each of whom slavishly maintains a blog. But do I read them? No. I can't possibly. And they don't read mine, either. They're too busy writing. Which is as it should be.

A Writer's Work

I'm returned from my delightful travels, and once the thank you's are written and the heap of laundry's done, I'll be ready to plunge back into work, though I think work is not the best word to describe writing. We call it work because it's hard and requires the sort of foresight, vision, planning, dedication and application that work requires. And yet, on the best of days, it's fun -- sheer, heady fun: the word that pops up out of nowhere to perfectly express our intent; the idea we didn't know we had. Even when we get it wrong, it's fun.

Margaret Mitchell was a Scorpio

Being a Scorpio, I've decided, is a detriment to a writer. As a Scorpio myself, I see all the characters in their varied complexity, I see their full histories and desires, I sense all the levels and layers to their lives and stories, and to corral all this, to simplify it and give it a clean, linear path, is very difficult for me. I'm constantly weaving elaborate webs in which I myself get caught.

But then, Sylvia Plath was born the same day as I, and she knew how to distill a complex thought. Dylan Thomas, a lion in my eyes, shares my birth date. Margaret Mitchell managed her complicated story quite well, as did Scorpios Marianne Moore, George Eliot, Robert Louis Stevenson, Bram Stoker, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Albert Camus, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the esteemed Margaret Atwood, among others. Anne Sexton, John Keats, and Ezra Pound were Scorpios. And John Irving! I mean, when I think about it, "Garp" couldn't have been written by other than a Scorpio.

I feel better now. If they can/could do it, so can I.

Back-Story Blues

The first screenplay I ever wrote turned out to be the easiest. It was born out of my frustration with a novel I couldn't manage. As a first-time novelist, I'd tackled a vast, multi-generational tale that I was in no way equipped to handle. The main story centered on a flawed female protagonist who falls in love against her will with an equally damaged man. This, the main story, was the one I found so difficult to write.

The back stories, on the other hand -- the stories of the generations that gave rise to this one -- flowed out of my pen effortlessly. With natural conflict and even some high-stakes drama, they practically wrote themselves.

Why was this the case? How are they any different? A story is a story, after all. Was I merely choking on the main story because it was the one that mattered, the hub around which all the other stories constellated? I still don't understand why I find then so easy to write, and now so impossible.

My solution to the problem with that novel was to take the main story and turn it into a screenplay, if only as an exercise. I was betting that the currency, pace and economy of a script would lend a freshness and urgency to the main story that was lacking in my novel. And it did. I'm very happy with that piece of work, all in all.

Ironically, I've now gone back to try my hand again with the original novel, and guess what's giving me fits? The back stories. Maybe it's time I turned them into screenplays, too.

Story vs. Plot

A memo was published recently, purportedly written by David Mamet to the writing staff of his now-defunct tv show, The Unit. In it, Mamet explains what makes for a compelling hour of television, and what does not. Essentially, he says what everyone says about dramatic scene writing [Caps his]:

EVERY SCENE MUST BE DRAMATIC. THAT MEANS: THE MAIN CHARACTER MUST HAVE A SIMPLE, STRAIGHTFORWARD, PRESSING NEED WHICH IMPELS HIM OR HER TO SHOW UP IN THE SCENE.

THIS NEED IS WHY THEY CAME. IT IS WHAT THE SCENE IS ABOUT. THEIR ATTEMPT TO GET THIS NEED MET WILL LEAD, AT THE END OF THE SCENE,TO FAILURE - THIS IS HOW THE SCENE IS OVER. IT, THIS FAILURE, WILL, THEN, OF NECESSITY, PROPEL US INTO THE NEXT SCENE.

ALL THESE ATTEMPTS, TAKEN TOGETHER, WILL, OVER THE COURSE OF THE EPISODE, CONSTITUTE THE PLOT.

I know it's true. It must be true. Yet I subscribe to Martin Scorsese's view: "Plot is interesting once. Story is interesting over and over again." This too is true.

Does leaning toward plot mean sacrificing story? Aren't some movies and/or novels heavier on plot than story? Aren't some heavier on story than plot? And don't some readers/viewers prefer one, while others prefer the other?

I know what you'll say: the best works balance the two. Do they? I'm reading War and Peace at the moment, which is all about story, and not at all about plot. It's story that endures, not plot. Yet, for a story to endure, it must be very well crafted indeed. And there's the rub.

A New Day, A New Blog

I have a fiction blog, The Misadventures of Jane, where I post pieces I'm working on. I have a music blog, It Still Moves, where I write exclusively about music. What I didn't have was a place, other than my numerous journals, where I could go to talk about writing and all the other things that interest me in life. This is that place.